


The Meaning Of The Word

by pipistrelle



Series: Locked Tomb Flufftober Prompts [9]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Coughing, F/F, Fever, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Gideon has 99 problems and a lot of them are projection and poor communication skills, Gideon's a useless lesbian with a big stupid heart, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, It all works out well, Necromantic Grad School Angst, Palamedes and Camilla are necro/cav goals in any universe, Pining, Sickfic, mentions of vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:07:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26631859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: Harrow, along with a good percentage of Canaan University's necromancy students, has the flu. Gideon has a lot of feelings that she is in no way equipped to handle. It's a tough week.
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Palamedes Sextus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Series: Locked Tomb Flufftober Prompts [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1914445
Comments: 40
Kudos: 252





	The Meaning Of The Word

**Author's Note:**

> Tagline: Dumbass Lesbian Is Jealous of Friends With Healthy Methods of Showing Affection
> 
> Alternate Tagline 1: You Want Them To Snuggle? Fine, But It'll Take 8,000 Words To Get There
> 
> Alternate Tagline 2: The 'Don't Die In A Bone' Scene, But Gayer And More Of It
> 
> Originally I was writing a little flufflet for the prompt "resilience". Then the weather turned brisk, the sun started setting at 6 pm, and I was consumed by a powerful need to relive my days at a New England university in the fall. I maintain that there is absolutely no better time or place for necromancy than a chill and dying hillside outside of Boston in late September, when everyone is hunkered down preparing for the hard, hungry days ahead, and also you have to study for exams. 
> 
> And then I slathered a hefty layer of Feelings on top of it, because how could you not.
> 
> All you really need to know about this AU is that it’s essentially a ‘modern grad school + magic’ situation, in which candidates for advanced Lyctoral degrees in necromancy are required to apply with a cavalier who goes through the program alongside them. Everyone’s a year or two older than in canon. If you want more detail on the totally irrelevant worldbuilding I did, check the end notes.

Gideon Nav was a simple creature. What she wanted, after pulling her third double shift in four days, was to drag her heavy bag and heavier body up the nine flights of stairs to her decrepit apartment, collapse on her beaten-down couch, and play Mortal Kombat until she lost consciousness. Maybe have a beer. 

But she couldn’t, because Harrow was taking up the couch with a billion stacks of impressive-looking books and three inches of Harrow. This was in flagrant violation of their own personal Geneva Convention, but she didn’t even look up as Gideon thumped in. 

This was, Gideon realized, because she was asleep. Properly asleep; she was so deep in whatever ghastly things she dreamed about that she didn’t stir when the door creaked open, or when Gideon’s bag hit the floor. Her head was tilted back against the mold-colored upholstery, exposing the lacerating point of her chin above the deceptively fragile-looking white curve of her throat, and there was a tiny pearlescent string of drool at one corner of her severe and improbably vicious mouth. The book she must have been reading had slid partway down the slope of her knees until it dangled precariously over the edge of the cushion, like a body swaying in a hangman’s noose.

Half a dozen contradictory desires tangled in a flaming multi-lane pileup in Gideon’s brain. She needed a marker. Or her phone. Or a marker _and_ her phone. Or that tube of glitter Corona had given her at Pride, that Harrow had tried and failed to confiscate. (And then there was the unspeakable desire, the nameless and forbidden one that rose up so hot and sudden that she halfway gave in to it before she caught it, and stuffed it back down into the pit of her stomach so fast that she’d probably have heartburn later.) 

Her phone was in her hand, and rifling through the drawers for a marker would take too long. She snapped a couple pics (for use in self-defense only; she wasn’t a monster), and only then said, too loudly, “Hey, Harrow!”

Harrow started up as though she’d been shot, eyes comically wide, grasping for her book like she was going to use it to brain a marauding murderer. She dropped it with a half-formed sound of distress when she saw Gideon. 

“Clear off, Nonagesimus,” Gideon told her. “I get the couch during normal human awake hours. You can have it when I’m asleep and you crawl back out of your coffin for your midnight revels.”

Harrow glared at her under beetling black brows. Asleep, she had been almost peaceful. Awake, she looked like ass. Her malevolent coal-shadow eyes were even more bloodshot than usual, her knife-sharp nose was red and her colorless lips cracked. Her hair was greasy and disarrayed, and — this was what gave Gideon a genuine chill — she was wearing no makeup whatsoever.

She opened her mouth to say something mean probably, but sneezed instead, a staccato squeaky sound like a baby bird exploding. Then she said “Nav,” in a voice that did not sound normal, tried to clear her throat, and smothered a cough into her sleeve. _Then_ she made a sound that was half sad little sniffle and half snarl of frustration, took one look at Gideon’s face, and wordlessly fled into her room like a wraith before the morning. The door shut behind her with an extremely emphatic _click_. 

Which left Gideon standing in the middle of their cramped living room, clear possessor of the couch and also of several questions, most prominent among them being _What the hell?_

She sidled over to Harrow’s door, which was paper-thin like all their doors and walls, and said through it, “Nonagesimus. Are you sick?”

For a while nothing happened. Just when Gideon was thinking about deciding not to care, Harrow said haughtily, also through the door, “I don’t see how that could possibly be any concern of yours.”

That made Gideon wince. Not because of the jab at her — which, okay, fuck you too, Harrow — but because Harrow’s voice was mangled and wrecked like it had been torn apart by wolves. Very scary and on-brand, but it sounded like it _hurt_. 

So Gideon said, “It’s my concern if you’re getting your germs all over everything. And if you die in there I’ll definitely get a rap for murdering you, which is hugely unfair if I don’t even get to do it.”

Silence.

Gideon sighed and rested her forehead against the door, which was cheap plywood that Harrow had painted black the day after they moved in for eldritch reasons of her own. “You could have texted me,” she said. “I would have stopped at the store on the way home and got you — I don’t know, cough drops or whatever. They’re starting to stock those fake Halloween skulls, you like skulls.” What else did you get sick people? Back at Drearburh the horrible great-aunts had treated everything with victim-blamey sermons, and the only other model Gideon had to work off of was syndicated TV. “I could have brought you soup or something.”

More silence. Maybe Harrow had lost her voice entirely. Maybe she was just being an ungrateful and uncommunicative asshole who would rather eat her own beating heart than send a _goddamn text message_. 

“Fine,” Gideon said to the door, and claimed her rightful ownership over the couch, shoving Harrow’s books underneath it where she could find them when she was done being a snotty recluse. 

She played Mortal Kombat until her eyes burned and her body went into forced shutdown, well into the small hours of the morning that were Harrow’s favorite lurking time. But she didn’t hear that chewed-up voice again, and the door stayed shut.

\----

Over the next few days Gideon began to feel like she was on the world’s shittiest safari, one where the animal you’d traveled all this way to see was a venomous snake that would fang you full of organ-rotting bile if you did manage, through great skill and care, to catch a glimpse of it. Harrow did not come out of her room. That would have been fine with Gideon, except a) if she didn’t come out of her room at some point she would probably fail her exams and/or die of dehydration, and b) Gideon actually, genuinely didn’t want her to die of dehydration. Or anything else, really. 

It was depressing as hell. It had only been a week since Harrow had marched into the YMCA pool where Gideon had been doing laps to work off her angst, and gotten into the pool fully clothed like some sort of lunatic, and told her — a lot of shit, honestly, that Gideon hadn’t really been processing, but had just been holding under her heart like a lead weight, heavy but solid, ugly and therefore reassuringly real. Things had been...different between them, since then. The old wounds were still there, of course they were, no amount of waterlogged confessions could erase almost twenty years of cruelty and bullshit manipulation. But it had started to feel like a wound that had been festering for _years_ had finally been lanced and drained of all its gangrenous pus and rot, and now — though still open, raw and red and tender — could actually start to heal. 

And now Harrow was avoiding her. Worse, she was sick, which meant she felt vulnerable, and she clearly thought Gideon would try to use that against her somehow. It was exhausting and unfair. It made Gideon’s heart hurt, and she didn’t know how to deal with it. So she walked down the block to the corner store and scrounged whatever looked useful — tissues, Gatorade, a wildly anatomically incorrect plastic bird skull the size of a football, the blandest crackers in existence — and left her haul on the counter when she went to work in the morning, like sacrificial offerings to some kind of abyssal swamp dragon that only crept out of its cave when no one was around to see it. 

Sometimes things had vanished out of the pile by the time she got home, which was one of her only two indications that Harrow was still alive. (On the day she brought home the bird skull, she came back and found a post-it stuck to the beak between the quizzically empty eye sockets, with a high-handed _RIDICULOUS_ scrawled across it. That actually made her smile.)

The only other clue she had that Harrow hadn’t yet succumbed to rigor mortis was the sounds she sometimes heard at night, through the pathetically flimsy wall that divided her closet-sized room from Harrow’s. They were not good sounds. Mostly they were in the realm of “coughing”, but once she’d thought she’d heard something that could have been crying, which was enough to keep her up the rest of the night and send her to knock on Harrow’s door in the morning. 

Of course there was no answer, and the door stayed shut. Gideon began to wonder if it would stay shut, as the old hymn said, forever. 

\----

On Wednesday, which should have been her day off, Gideon got called in because half her co-workers were out with some kind of flu. She gave herself Thursday afternoon off instead as a reward, and in hopes she could lay a clever trap for Harrow by being in the apartment at an unusual time. Alas, her extremely sneaky strategy failed, and after an hour or so of pretending to play DOOM while staring miserably at Harrow’s light-devouring door, she decided to cut her losses and go for a run.

Getting outside was like finally clawing her way free of a stifling sarcophagus. Summer was dearly departed and September halfway gone, which meant there was the perfect unwhetted edge of a chill in the air, and the trees planted infrequently in their little cages of six-inch iron pickets were beginning to show the ochre and umber banners of their glorious decline. It was spooky as shit, exactly the kind of weather and season that Canaan University campus had been built for. Probably by a cabal of ancient morbid necromancers with goatees who had smoked pipes and engraved racist Lovecraft quotes on the cornerstones of all the buildings. The spires raked across the bloody sunset like claws. 

Harrow would have loved it. She would have been bitching the whole time about totally stupid things, and probably made a skeleton carry her after the first two blocks when she got tired of trying to keep pace with Gideon. But she would have loved it, deep down in the subterranean labyrinth of her soul where she kept her non-Hot Topic-approved emotions.

Gideon had been letting herself drift at a steady jogging pace, her feet as aimless as her thoughts, until she realized that her own subterranean fretting had taken her down Fourth Ave and across Koniortos Court, where the smaller but cozier of the university’s two coffeeshops glowed with cheerful light and chatter in its little cul-de-sac. Past that was the hill where she usually turned back, after she’d gone just far enough to see Rhodes College, its red brick arches spidered now with empty trellises as their famous roses wilted in the coming cold. And just before Rhodes, squat and round and gray like an overturned cake-tin, was the Library.

 _Well, what the hell_ , she thought, and jogged down the far slope towards that most uninteresting realm of nerds and the incomprehensible gibberish that thrilled their little nerd hearts. Gideon had never set foot in the Library the whole time she’d been on campus, and she didn’t intend to start now. Instead she took an oblique path, cutting off the corner of its square lawn, and turned onto a wickedly steep side street. Halfway up it was a reassuringly boring concrete block that had started life as a warehouse and ended life as cheap grad student housing. Gideon thumbed the buzzer marked _PS & CH _ until the door unlocked with a _thunk_ , then took the stairs two at a time as a cooldown.

Outside the familiar door she hesitated, suddenly realizing that it was kind of awkward to show up unannounced on a random weekday evening to the home of people who were definitely her friends, but also definitely had their own shit going on and tended to be pretty private, and okay, maybe Harrow wasn’t the only one who could use a course called _When to Send a Goddamn Text Message 101 (with Dr. Skelebone)_. 

She’d sign them both up for it next semester. But she was already there, so she knocked. Gideon was not big on the concept of prudent retreat.

“Enter, be ye friend or foe,” Palamedes called from within, because he was the nerdiest by far of all the nerds that huddled close to the Library, and therefore their rightful king. When Gideon nudged the door open he said, “Oh, Gideon! Good, a foe would have been tedious. Cam’s tired.”

Cam looked tired. In fact, in the warm wash of low light from the single lamp, Cam looked asleep. She was stretched out the length of the couch with her head on a pillow propped against Palamedes’ bony thigh. He had his slippered feet up on the coffee table, his tablet balanced precariously on the arm of the couch and stacks of books everywhere that wasn’t taken up by Cam. (Presumably some of them were the same books as Harrow’s, though Gideon couldn’t have told you what books Harrow read if you paid her to guess.) His right hand moved between turning pages and typing unhurriedly on the tablet screen. His left arm, which looked like it might have been useful to whatever he was doing, was instead draped over Cam’s shoulder and back, his left hand resting innocuously just at the lower end of her ribcage, where the blanket she’d clearly been wrapped up in had been kicked down and crumpled to her waist.

Cam’s eyes were closed. The whole room was so gray, with gray walls and gray sixth-hand furniture (that was somehow still nicer than Gideon and Harrow’s), that it was hard to tell if Cam’s face had the same unhealthy pallor that Harrow’s had. But the thermometer and assortment of pills laid out in front of Palamedes (with the sort of precise spatial arrangement available only to a deeply deranged mind) left little doubt that she’d fallen to the same mucoid scourge. And the barf bucket near her head was a pretty good clue, though it was empty, thank God.

“Ouch,” Gideon said, less a specific comment and more an expression of the general emotion of the room.

Cam said, “I could still bench-press you with one arm.”

Her voice wasn’t as scraped-bloody as Harrow’s, but it wasn’t fun to listen to, either. She did not look capable of bench-pressing one of Palamedes’ middleweight books, let alone an entire Gideon; but Gideon had experienced enough Camilla Hect surprise power-moves not to be surprised by them anymore, and didn’t even question it. The woman was completely feral and Gideon felt a deep and healthy respect for her that was not lessened by seeing her at rest.

Besides, Gideon’s eyes kept gravitating back to Palamedes’ hand resting on his cavalier’s side. It was a practical touch; Gideon guessed that with a hand near her ribs, he could probably monitor her heart rate and breathing, and whatever other data he collected for his forays into questionable medical science. It also had a quality that reminded Gideon irresistibly of a pair of small figures huddled together on a storm-lashed rock in the middle of a frigid, heaving sea. It said: _the world is an awful place and it will kill us if it can, but I'm here with you, for whatever that's worth_. It said: _I've got you. I can't make it better, but I've got you all the same_. It was profoundly, embarrassingly, heart-flayingly tender, evisceratingly intimate in a way that Gideon did not fully understand, and they were both so unselfconscious about it.

Palamedes must have seen her gawking, but he didn’t flinch or try to conceal the incriminating evidence that he loved his cavalier. Obviously. Who didn’t know that? He just looked at her and said sympathetically, “Nonagesimus is sick too?”

Gideon had a vague understanding that his magic could pull information out of nowhere, but she hoped with a baseless hope, for about the millionth time, that he couldn’t read her mind. That would just make him insufferable. “How’d you know?”

“Call it deduction. How can we help?” Cam made a soft disgruntled sound and he amended it to, “How can I help?”

Gideon looked at them again. Camilla, an unparalleled warrior in her prime, compact with muscle and fueled by an internal furnace of cynicism to rival a star, laid tragically low; and her necromancer, who was only more substantial than Harrow because he was taller, looking comparatively full of health and cheer. To Palamedes she said, “How come you aren’t puking your guts up and sounding like a wood chipper that smokes three packs a day?”

He smiled. His eyes really were gorgeous; the only actually noteworthy gray in a whole palette of shitty grays. Gideon realized she was probably taking advantage of a rare privilege, to be able to look closely at him while Camilla was too distracted to glower threateningly.

He said, “I was. Today’s the first day I’ve been able to sit upright in almost a week. Feels quite luxurious, actually. Cam probably got it from me.”

Camilla muttered, “Shouldn’t be working,” in the general direction of his kneecap.

Her necromancer snorted. "Says the person who wanted to do chin-ups with a temp of 102. Formatting bibliographies will not put me at risk of a relapse."

"Assumption," Camilla said. She sounded too exhausted to bother with more words.

"Foolhardiness," Palamedes retorted, with such intensity of gruff fondness that it made Gideon's chest hurt. Then, remembering they weren’t alone in the room, he looked back up at Gideon. “You see what I’ve been putting up with. Nonagesimus isn’t too bad off?”

That was all it took. “I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I haven’t seen her in days, not even to get yelled at or stabbed with bones. She _loves_ trying to stab me with bones, but now she won’t even _talk_ to me. I don’t know if she’s dying, I don’t know if she’s dead, all I know is that she keeps making these seriously bad sounds, and I don’t like it! I don’t know what to _do_!”

Palamedes frowned thoughtfully through this gush of nonsense. At last he said, “There’s not much to do, honestly, if it’s this flu bug that’s going around. The most important thing is that she doesn’t get dehydrated. Look, not that you’re not welcome here anytime, but -- why didn’t you call?”

Gideon opened her mouth to answer him and didn’t, because there was no way she could while preserving the illusion that she was halfway sane. What could she say? _I didn’t call you because the only thing Harrow hates more than_ being _weak is other people_ knowing _she’s weak, and it didn’t occur to me to spill her secrets until I was already in the neighborhood_? Or, _We were raised in a shadow cult with a lot of emphasis on mystery and that’s probably still gumming up whatever neurons are supposed to give you the ability to just call people and ask them for help_? Or, _Are you sure that’s even legal? Sounds fake to me, might want to check your facts._

What actually came out of her mouth, in perfect accordance with the principles of Drearburh, was, “Uh.”

“Never mind,” said Palamedes, who knew a nonsensical clusterfuck when he saw one standing in his living room with her jaw open like a tongue-sewn cadaver. “There’s a spare kit under the sink, should have basic supplies in it. Like I said, most important thing is to keep her hydrated. If she can’t keep down fluids, or if her temperature goes over 103, she probably needs the hospital. She won’t like it, but you’ll have to convince her. Otherwise she should be fine. I can’t make her talk to you, I’m afraid.”

This was going to go down like a lead balloon. “Can’t you give me some kind of medicine?” Gideon asked, ever the optimist. “Something I could slip into her food? Or knock her out and shove down her throat, I'm not picky."

"While I see the appeal of that approach," Palamedes drawled, “it's ethically dubious and unlikely to work."

Cam stirred a little, the first movement Gideon had seen her make. "Dunno. Always works fine for me.”

Gideon knew she liked Camilla, who was absolutely doing her a solid right now in the morale department. Palamedes' face was worth its weight in knucklebones. "Cam, you haven't --"

"I’d advise you not to finish that sentence," Camilla said, which was a downright extravagant speech. She opened her eyes at last, with a subdued but perfectly detectable hint of self-satisfaction.

But her necromancer just smiled, the neatest, smallest, fondest smile Gideon had ever seen. "Cavaliers,” he said, apparently rhetorically, but then he seemed to take something in Gideon’s face as a request for a lecture -- not like he needed the provocation -- and went on, “Lifestyle factors aside, necromancers are not healthy people. Being steeped in thanergy all the time creates subtle interference with thalergetic processes. We're not -- resilient. Cardiac and pulmonary function are worse than average, physiologic reserves are crap, circulation's terrible --"

"Sense of self-preservation is erratic," interjected Camilla, who appeared to be making a miraculous recovery for the sole purpose of needling her necromancer. Which, to be fair, would probably have also brought Gideon back from the brink of death. 

"As she says. And our immune systems are shot to hell on a good day. I know Nonagesimus likes to handle things by herself, but if she’s as sick as she sounds then she probably needs looking after.” Because Palamedes was a kind person, he did not add: _Which you as her cavalier should have been doing this whole time, you colossal fuck-up_. That was all right. Gideon added it for him.

“Thanks,” she said, and genuinely meant it, despite the fact that she now felt about ready to crawl back to Drearburh and curl up in the darkest, foulest niche they had so she could decompose out of sheer unhappiness. 

But Palamedes’ frown deepened exponentially at her expression, and he looked like he was going to try to get up, to comfort her maybe, which was ridiculous -- no reason for him to strain himself and dislodge his own sick but still perfectly competent cavalier just because Gideon was being a baby. So she headed for the kitchen and pulled a little black case out from under the sink -- it was disgustingly easy to find, everything was so _organized_ , how was she friends with people who lived like this -- and said, “Seriously, thanks. You’re a Pal, Sex,” just before she fled. She even thought she heard Camilla snort in amusement as the door closed behind her.

\----

Night had fallen fast, which meant she had to climb the nine flights up in the dark, since the stairwell lights hadn’t worked since before she was born. That was fine. She’d been raised on the Drearburh estate with its million miles of treacherous creaking halls and its five-cents-a-month electric bill. She didn’t need light to unlock the door to the apartment, or to notice that something inside was profoundly different and bad. 

Her stomach churned, and the hairs on her arms rose with ancient animal wariness. The living room lights were off, but she didn’t need them to see that Harrow’s bedroom door was open, a sliver of black on darker black. Then she noticed that the bathroom door was also open, and through it, in the moonlight from the window, she saw a Harrow-sized shadow crumpled on the tile. 

“Shit,” she said. Then her brain jolted her body to _wake up, idiot,_ and she scrambled forward, to do — what? CPR? She didn’t know CPR. She’d been gone for at least an hour, if Harrow was as un-resilient as Palamedes said then she was probably dead already, fuck, why couldn’t she send a fucking _text_ —

 _You didn’t text her either_ , said a completely fucking unhelpful part of Gideon’s brain, which she ignored. The sodium-yellow bathroom light was blinding when she flicked it on, so bright that it made Harrow wince and groan like the protest of rusted-shut hinges on some ancient tomb. Good, at least she wasn’t mega-dead. Gideon dropped down beside her and hesitated. What was she supposed to do?

Harrow twitched and wheezed. She was clutching a thin black blanket that had pooled around her, looking like a vampire’s cloak draped coincidentally over the skeleton of one of its ancient long-gnawed victims. Harrow had always been unsettlingly bony, but in the harsh light and only the weirdly Victorian nightdress she seemed to love, her limbs looked downright translucent. At least she was decent -- 

Probably because her brain was shying away from horrors too dreadful to contemplate, Gideon’s mouth said, “How’s your day going? Need a hand?”

“Fuck you, Nav,” Harrow groused. She tried to get off the floor, but she was shaking too hard. Watching her fail felt like an iron nail to the heart. “I’m — fine.”

Gideon surreptitiously glanced at all the sharp corners in the room, checking for splashes of blood. “Harrow, please tell me you didn’t hit your head when you fainted and forgot what _fine_ means.”

“I didn’t — faint,” she rasped, pausing mid-lie to cough disgustingly.

“So you were taking a nap on the bathroom floor of your own free will?”

Harrow flared up in anger, the ever-burning Nonagesimus rage that could have solved the energy crisis with its sheer wattage of spite if only Gideon could convince the world׳s scientists to discover how to harness it. “I’m not an _invalid_! Don’t _look_ at me like that!”

Gideon didn’t know how she was looking at Harrow, and neither did Harrow, since her face was still pointed pretty firmly towards the floor. _If you had ever in your life done even one pushup_ , Gideon’s brain babbled, but what she said was, “I’ll stop looking at you like this if you can get up without — no, you know what, I don’t even want to watch you try it. Come on, let me help you. Don’t rip my organs out, please, or they’ll find us both dead on the bathroom floor and the news story will be nasty and weird.”

It was hard to find a safe place to touch; Gideon ended up sort of grabbing Harrow by the shoulders with one arm around her upper back, feeling the points of her vertebrae like barbed wire. God, she was nothing, just skin and tendon and bone, held together by paranoia and expensive black eyeliner. And she was hot as a fucking furnace. Gideon had expected that -- Harrow spiked appalling fevers when she was sick, she always had -- but she still hated it. She had never quite gotten over the childhood fear, fed by black-and-white body-horror flicks, that Harrow’s brain was going to melt and leave her a shambling zombie thirsty for blood.

It was absurdly easy to get her onto the couch, and Gideon was pretty sure that in her weakened state, the ratty quilt draped over her was heavy enough to keep her there. That much accomplished, Gideon floundered around for something else useful to do and ended up wetting a washcloth under the rattling rust-throated tap, which she brought back and draped carefully over Harrow’s forehead. She half expected steam to billow up from it as soon as it came in contact with the casing for her overheated brain, and she half expected Harrow to try to bite her like a pissed-off animal as soon as Gideon's hand got near her face.

It didn’t, and she didn’t. Gideon would take her victories where she could get them. 

Once she’d turned on the lights and retrieved it from the floor where she’d dropped it in a panic, she opened Sex Pal’s little bag. Inside she found a thermometer, a few different kinds of pills, gauze, bandages, a tiny curved needle with a spool of thread, an uncurved needle that was probably for bloodletting, and half a handful of all-purpose finger bones. This did not make her feel less panicky. It made her feel like she was panicking while clutching a collection of items that someone who actually had their shit together would probably know how to use.

First things first. She gripped the thermometer like a rapier and turned to face her necromancer.

Harrow had looked like hot garbage three days ago, half-glimpsed in full retreat. Pinned down like a specimen for dissection, squinting in the glare of the ancient fly-spotted fluorescent bulbs, she looked worse. Her eyes were hollowed out and ghastly, her lips bone-dry and bleeding a little, her skin an awful clammy grayish color. The high flush of fever in her cheeks did absolutely nothing to help; it was unnatural on Harrow’s normally-bloodless face. Her hair was unwashed and stuck up at odd angles that would have been hilarious on any other day, and a burst blood vessel in one eye seemed to glare accusingly at Gideon, as though any of this were her fault. 

In a voice that hurt so much Gideon was surprised her ears didn’t bleed just from hearing it, Harrow rasped, “What are you doing?”

“Trying to make sure you don’t die,” Gideon said hotly. She’d been scared by how insubstantial Harrow felt, like she was in danger of crumbling into ash and smoke. “I know you’ve got your whole _princess of cryptique mystery_ image to worry about, but maybe I don’t want to have to break down your door and pull your body out from under a pile of bones just because you wanted to wallow in your #aesthetic. Did you ever think of that?”

Even six inches from the door of her macabre mistress Death, Harrow could summon an expression of cynical boredom that would have shamed the bitchy popular drama queen in every high school chick flick Gideon had ever watched. Probably because Gideon had said the word ‘hashtag’. 

She croaked, “Don’t get hysterical, Griddle. No one’s going to die.”

“Oh yeah? Did you figure that while you were passed out on the bathroom floor alone for God knows how long?”

“Griddle — “

Harrow’s attempt at cold scorn was backfiring spectacularly. It just made her more pathetic, which was making Gideon want to put her own head through a wall. “You probably have the flu, you dipshit. People die from the flu! Especially when they lock themselves away and don’t eat or drink anything for days! Do you want to leave _me_ behind as the person who’s going to write your obituary? Because I will abuse that power, Harrow, I will abuse it _so hard_ that you will come back as a revenant just to say ‘Gideon, I wish I had listened to you and not moped my way to an untimely death, for now I will be forever remembered as President and founder of the Goth Clown Club at Drearburh High.'”

Harrow looked faintly nauseous. There was no way of telling if it was because of what she was feeling or what she was hearing. Gideon let out a long breath and said, very reasonably, “I swear on any bone you want, I will never ask you for anything again if you just _work with me on this_.”

She held out the thermometer. Harrow looked at it for about five seconds as if she had no idea what to do with it, then took it and put it under her tongue. She glared weakly at Gideon the whole time, as if to say, _Do not become accustomed to this docile and cooperative demeanor, Nav, you fool_.

It beeped. Harrow took it out of her mouth and Gideon snatched it from her before she could try to hide it in the couch cushions, or do something else obtuse and obstructive. “102.7,” she read off. Something within her that had been wound tight as the spring on a steel trap relaxed, fractionally. “Okay, that’s not as bad as I expected. Don’t move.”

She went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of water. Harrow hadn’t moved. “Drink this, and do not even _try_ to argue about it. Palamedes said necromancers are fragile snowflakes, especially bone adepts,” (that was just to annoy her) “and if you don’t stay hydrated I have to take you to the hospital, which will be fun for no one.”

“You went to Sextus?” Harrow sounded more incredulous than angry, though it was hard to tell through all the glass and gravel in her throat.

Maybe Gideon should have played that card a little closer to her chest, but she found she didn’t care. She thought that she should feel better -- here was Harrow in front of her, alive and, if not well, then at least not in immediate danger of shuffling off this mortal coil to join her best buds the skeletons in a shallow and early grave. And that did make Gideon feel better, sort of. But on another, more immediate level, she felt worse. Every tremor in Harrow’s hands, every sniffle and shudder, was another pebble in the avalanche of Gideon’s total failure as a cavalier. Distracted, she said, “Yeah, I did, and he made me feel like shit, so that was a fun way to spend the afternoon.”

“That’s uncharacteristic of him,” Harrow said, mostly to herself. The threat of constant skeletal attack had tuned Gideon’s senses to Harrow-vision at a very early age, so she saw the speculative gleam come into Harrow’s eye that would one day grow into premeditated murder.

“He didn’t do it on purpose,” Gideon said, not that Harrow cared. Harrow was probably busy plotting six ways she could excavate Gideon’s vital organs for daring to tell any of their friends that she was anything less than stunningly healthy and viciously competent at all times.

Gideon sat down beside the couch, suddenly too tired from Harrow’s incessant barrage of bullshit to stay upright. She let her head fall back against the armrest and looked at the patch of water damage on the ceiling, which hurt much less than looking at Harrow’s green-gilled ferrety little face. “I don’t understand,” she said to the universe at large. “I am but a humble peon and I crave enlightenment. I do _everything_ you fucking ask. I do things you don’t even ask me to do. What will it take to get you to _trust_ me? What am I fucking up? And what do you think I’m going to do to you anyway, knife you and steal your kidneys? If I’d wanted to do that you would have been kidney-less years ago. Your stupid kidneys probably aren’t worth shit anyways.” It was perhaps not the most devastating insult, but it made Gideon feel a little better.

Harrow tried to snap something equally cutting, but it caught in her throat and she curled in on herself, hacking a wretched rib-cracking cough. Gideon twisted around in alarm, and had halfway reached for her before she caught herself and folded her hand back down against her thigh. 

Harrow dragged herself upright and made an honest effort to drink the water Gideon had given her, even if she did it with a face like she thought it might be poisoned. After a minute she got her breath back, though it was shallow and shitty-sounding. She looked at Gideon with her bottomless black eyes and rasped, “Nav, I don’t — why are you so angry?”

Gideon opened her mouth and closed it again. She scrubbed the heel of her hand across her face, counted to ten experimentally, and still felt the urge to shake Harrow until something in her warped brain clicked into place and she stopped doing — whatever the fuck this was. She said, “I know you’re deathly allergic to needing help from another living human, but you should have _told_ me you were sick. You should have told me you were getting worse! You could have said ‘Hey, good morning Gideon, I’m about to puke my guts up and spontaneously combust’, and I would have said, ‘Yuck, I hate knowing that’, and then I’d have _taken care of you_ , and made sure you didn’t pass out on the floor, and, I don’t know, made you watch a Disney movie or something.”

Cautiously, suspiciously, as though anticipating the most bald-faced and brazen of lies, Harrow asked, “Why?”

“Because I think watching enough of them might de-program some of your dark and morbid desires,” Gideon said. Then she heard Harrow’s actual question, and her heart, which had been under a lot of strain this week, snapped clean in two. 

Gideon turned around fully this time to face the couch. Harrow had curled up on her side and taken off the now-lukewarm washcloth, which she fiddled with while she watched Gideon’s face carefully, as though expecting it to do something astonishing. Gideon didn’t know what her face was doing. She didn’t know what her hands were doing, either, and she was mildly startled when one of them folded around Harrow’s hands, keeping them still. Harrow’s hands were hot as the rest of her, and a little shaky even now, and felt terrifyingly fragile in Gideon’s grip.

She said, “I’m your cavalier, you jackass. That’s what cavaliers _do_. I know it was all a big joke to start with, but I’m here now, and I’m the only cavalier you’ve got, and I thought maybe, since last week —“

She couldn’t say _I thought maybe it was starting to mean something to you_ , because if she did she would die on the spot immediately and Harrow, being a bone-obsessed weirdo, would probably do obscene things to her corpse.

Harrow’s face had screwed up into a mask of concentration, like she was trying to comprehend an advanced orbital physics equation through a pane of dirty glass. “I may have miscalculated,” she said at last, which was a groveling apology in Harrow-speak. “After our conversation, I thought it best if I didn’t -- impose on you with my infirmity. By my failures as your necromancer, I have forfeited that right.”

Gideon blinked. “Oh my God. That is so -- this is not about _rights_. We’re all we have, Harrow. I want…” _I want to know that you want me here, because_ _you’re all that matters_. She thought again, involuntarily, of Camilla and Palamedes, their easy comfort with and for each other, their obnoxiously quaint domesticity. It would never be like that between her and Harrow; how could it be? But it could be easier than it was now. It could be a healed fracture, a resurrection. "I want to be your cavalier. But you have to let me do it."

For once in her benighted life, Harrow seemed to be listening. Actually listening, like she might use her bone-deep knowledge of Gideon’s soul and psyche to do something other than flay her. It was one of the profoundly strange expressions that Gideon had caught her making a few times since the pool. She still had no idea how to handle it.

Apparently Harrow didn’t either. “Tell me how I can regain your trust,” she said doggedly, like she’d read it out of a goddamn self-help book with a title like _One Flesh, One End: The 5 Principles of Not Stabbing Your Cavalier In The Neck And Reanimating Her For Kicks._

Still, it was an opening, and for all her shortcomings Gideon _was_ at least a half-trained swordswoman. She couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get inside Harrow’s guard. “For starters: don’t die of the fucking flu,” she said. “And drink some more goddamn water, and watch _Lion King,_ and sleep maybe sometime this decade. And _tell me_ next time you think you’re going down a road that’s going to end with you passed out on the bathroom floor, and then maybe _don’t_ go down it.”

“All right,” Harrow said quietly, with remarkably little hesitation, although her face looked like she was submitting to be led to the gallows. “I accept those terms.”

“Of course you do,” Gideon huffed. And then, because Harrow was _right there_ , because she looked so utterly and unguardedly miserable, because that _why_ was still lodged under Gideon’s ribs like shrapnel and she didn’t know if she’d ever be able to fish it out, but mostly because she’d done it once a week ago in the half-lit YMCA pool at two in the morning and she’d been slowly dying since then from the dark and forbidden desire to do it again, Gideon bowed her head as though in prayer and pressed her lips to Harrow’s forehead, just above the probably-permanent frown lines between the left and right supraorbital ridge.

It was gross. Harrow was slimy and broiling and needed a shower, like, two days ago. It also made Gideon feel like she was the one whose organs were about to start shutting down, as her heart somehow both swelled like a helium balloon and pounded at the inside of her sternum like a jackhammer. Firecrackers seemed to be fizzing under most of her skin. It was entirely possible that she might die, which would really take the sting out of the little speech she’d just given and cost her the moral high ground to boot.

Harrow’s eyes were glazed over with a distant stare, as though she had left her body. Probably better that way; the last thing she needed was another shock to her system. 

Gideon was gripped by a momentary panic that drove her to get up and out before Harrow regained her senses and tried to retaliate. Despite the fact that her brain had short-circuited and was spitting sparks, she somehow made it to the kitchen and refilled Harrow’s empty glass. 

When she came back to the couch she found Harrow sitting up, folded into a concavity of quilt like the skeleton of some long-dead nerd stuffed into a locker. Her complexion had slid several degrees further towards “spoiled dairy product”, and she was doing that stubborn thing with her jaw that Gideon hated. “Nav,” she started, flushed unevenly now with something that might not have been anger, “I do not deserve -- this. Any of this. I deserve your hatred --” she interrupted herself with a fit of coughing, which was awful, but also, thank God. She was starting to sound a very tiny bit hysterical.

“Don’t,” Gideon said. 

Harrow cleared her airway enough to manage, “But I —“

“Nope,” Gideon said. “Cease and desist. Unfriended. Blocked. I do not want to hear your angsty protests. Drink water and go to sleep.” She shoved the glass at Harrow, who took it and actually drank most of it without complaint, probably out of surprise.

They stared at each other. Harrow set the glass down as though it were a priceless necromantic relic, chewed uncertainly on her bottom lip, and sort of shrank into herself, as though she was afraid Gideon might try to encroach on her bubble of personal space again. Then, like one of those trick images that turned from a wizened old crone into the two ladies kissing, Gideon suddenly saw the whole thing the other way around. Harrow was making room for Gideon to fit in beside her.

This was not a thing they had ever done before, but then, neither was passing out on the floor of the bathroom, or kissing each other’s foreheads. The world, Gideon thought dizzily, was a minefield of unexpected and dreadfully terrifying delights, often to be found in the worst of all possible places. 

Accepting Harrow’s implicit invitation was a tricky process. She ended up easing herself down onto the couch as though sliding gingerly into a bathtub of hot magma, careful not to touch Harrow in even the tiniest and most minute way, because that would have made it weird. Well, more weird. 

Then Harrowhark Nonagesimus, apparently more delirious than either of them had realized, curled up into a knobbly black blob, like a comma in the last line of an execution order, and rested her head on Gideon’s thigh. 

“If I sit up I’ll pass out again, and my neck hurts. Do not get used to this,” Harrow said with an anemic touch of her usual acidity and only a little bit of shrill panic. 

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Gideon, who was quietly having a stroke and couldn’t figure out where it was safe to put her hands.

“Good.” In a much more subdued voice, the nearest Gideon had ever heard Harrow come to a whimper, she said, “Griddle. I feel…astonishingly awful.”

“I know that, asshole.” Judging by the feel of it, Gideon’s brain had passed the limits of the solar system and was well on its way to the outer rim of the galaxy, which left her mouth running on automatic. She was in danger of needing a lie-down herself. “Go to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.” That was almost certainly a lie -- Harrow probably had a few more days of sweaty misery ahead of her -- but it also felt like the right thing to say.

And it must have been, because it worked. “Just a few minutes,” Harrow murmured, shivering a little, still sounding like she wasn’t entirely sure that any of this was happening. “Wake me in an hour.”

“Sure,” said Gideon, who had absolutely no intention of doing that. “Whatever you say, night boss.”

\----

Gideon was regrettably used to sleeping in weird places. She’d spent half their first semester at Canaan locked with Harrow in the Lyctor labs until the sun rose, snoring in the arms of an abandoned skeleton while Harrow cursed and blood-sweated over some incomprehensible tome of entrails. She’d once been exiled from Drearburh house for three nights, and slept in a tree to avoid the wolves running loose in the woods. So it was no big deal to wake, groggy and confused, and find she’d fallen asleep sitting on their couch. She’d done that plenty of times, usually after a marathon video game session, only to be jolted rudely awake when Harrow crept out of her den at some ungodly hour to reclaim her study space by pelting Gideon with molars and phalanges until she moved.

 _Harrow_ \--

She was alone. The room was black as pitch, the curtains drawn. Fear oozed down Gideon’s throat like cold oil, but her brain was ablaze with visions of black shadows crumpled in various unlikely and dangerous places. She was halfway to standing when a small hand caught at her shoulder.

“For someone so concerned about her status as a cavalier, you’re terrible at following instructions,” Harrow griped, then coughed fretfully. Her grip on Gideon’s shoulder wasn’t even strong enough to hurt, but Gideon let herself be pushed back down anyway. 

Lumpy knitted wool brushed her shins. It had the unique texture of the eye-searingly neon green blanket Dulcinea had made for Gideon last Christmas. Harrow hated that blanket and all it represented with a frankly petty intensity, but it was undoubtedly the warmest thing either of them owned. 

Harrow tucked herself peremptorily against Gideon’s side and dragged the blanket over them both, digging her elbows and knees into Gideon as much as she could in the process, apparently just for fun. That must mean she was feeling a little better, at least. 

It was like cuddling up to a feverish, sniffling caltrop. Gideon was in bliss. 

“What,” Harrow said into Gideon’s clavicle.

Gideon was grinning. “You came back. You got up to get that thing and _came back_. You know what that means, Nonagesimus?”

“It means everywhere else is too cold,” Harrow said irritably. “You’re conveniently exothermic.”

“It _means_ you lost your excuse,” Gideon corrected her. “Now you’re cuddling with me, _on purpose_ , and you can never take that back.”

Harrow was silent just long enough to stir Gideon’s fight-or-flight response. Then she said, a little distantly, “There are many things I can never take back.” But instead of launching into a morbid monologue she sighed and reverted to a much more comfortable prickly primness. “You were the one who was so insistent on _sleeping_ , Nav, you could at least be quiet.”

“Yes, my crepuscular queen,” Gideon said somberly. Harrow huffed in disgust, then muffled a tired cough into the folds of Dulcinea’s blanket and pressed her shivering shoulder into Gideon’s ribcage like she had intent to wound. Gideon considered kissing the top of her head, just to rub it in, but figured that was probably pushing her luck. Still, she was going to get _so much mileage_ out of this. She was going to ride this until she ran out of road. 

“You realize you’re going to catch this, if you haven’t already,” Harrow said, halfway between worry and scorn, which was a weird and uncomfortable place.

“Worth it,” Gideon replied, and at Harrow’s disbelieving scoff she added, “When I was twelve I would have let a skeleton bite my arm off to get this much blackmail material on you. If you become a Lyctor and live a million years, you aren’t living this down.”

“You’re so juvenile,” Harrow muttered, but she was still pressed against Gideon like a cat come in out of the cold. This time Gideon could feel as Harrow slowly, slowly relaxed. Not all the way — Harrowhark probably wouldn’t fully relax even after she was dead — but enough that her limbs no longer felt like the jaws of a mousetrap about to snap shut, and her breathing started to slow. The thought that Harrow felt _safe_ at Gideon’s side, like “locked behind three layers of bone wards” safe, almost convinced Gideon that Harrow had actually murdered her in retaliation for that stolen kiss and this was a hallucination as she choked on her own tibia. 

But no, Harrow was snoring now, the tiny whistling snore that she would never in ten thousand years admit to. 

It wasn’t the Cav of the Year Award, but it might have meant more than anything else Gideon had accomplished in her life. She’d take it, any day.

**Author's Note:**

> Notes on the AU:
> 
> -This started as a straightforward modern-ish AU, but I couldn’t conceptualize these characters without the framework of the necro/cavalier connection, so it became modern-ish + necromancy.
> 
> -Necromancers aren’t exactly rare, but they’re uncommon enough that most peoples’ lives are more or less necromancy-free. Adepts tend to congregate in certain prestigious specialties including medicine, criminal investigation, spirit-talking (most famously exorcisms), and military ops with the Necromantic Cohort.
> 
> -Most necromancers don’t have cavaliers, and the role of cavalier is considered kind of antiquated these days. But Canaan University runs one of the only programs in the world that offers a Lyctoral degree, which is the most complex and dangerous level of necromancy ever attained. Becoming a Lyctor is so complex and dangerous that the program itself has some poorly-explained casualties every year, which the administrators swear are not the University’s fault -- not that it matters, since all the waivers are signed and no one can prove anything. Necromancers are not permitted to apply to the program without a cavalier, who advances through the program alongside them, with parallel and integrated training.
> 
> -Harrow and Gideon were raised at Drearburh, a decrepit estate in the woods of New England now wholly owned by a collapsing shadow cult. (There are a lot of shadow cults in this world. Think Lovecraft, or "Lovecraft Country".) Gideon got out when she was 16; two years later, Harrow used chicanery to convince/bully Gideon into accompanying her to Canaan as her cavalier.
> 
> -Cam and Pal met and grew up together as two of the very few children on an Arctic necromantic research station called Base Six, where their parents were studying ice cores to locate trace thanergy from prehistoric mass extinction events. That has nothing to do with the story but I think it’s neat. (Also they’re not cousins in this AU because if I said I didn’t ship them a little bit I would be lying.)
> 
> -I haven't decided what job Gideon has. I'm strongly leaning towards barista for the multiple AU combo modifier, but I'm not 100% convinced yet.


End file.
